lexicon 0.1.2

* `AliasDict`, a dictionary supporting both simple and complex key aliasing: * Alias a single key to another key, so that e.g. `mydict['bar']` points to `mydict['foo']`, for both reads and writes. * Alias a single key to a list of other keys, for writing only, e.g. with `active_groups = AliasDict({'ops': True, 'biz': True, 'dev': True, 'product': True})` one can make an alias `'tech'` mapping to `('ops', 'dev')` and then e.g. `active_groups['tech'] = False`. * Aliasing is recursive: an alias pointing to another alias will behave as if it points to the other alias' target.* `AttributeDict`, supporting attribute read & write access, e.g. `mydict = AttributeDict({'foo': 'bar'})` exhibits `mydict.foo` and `mydict.foo = 'new value'`.* `Lexicon`, a subclass of both of the above which exhibits both sets of behavior.

## HOW

* `pip install lexicon`* `from lexicon import Lexicon` (or one of the superclasses)* Use as needed.

You can install the [developmentversion](https://github.com/bitprophet/lexicon/tarball/master#egg=lexicon-dev)via `pip install lexicon==dev`.

If you have a clone of the source repository, you can run the tests like so:

* `pip install -r requirements.txt`* `spec`

## API

### `AliasDict`

In all examples, `'myalias'` is the alias and `'realkey'` is the "real",unaliased key.

* `alias(from_'myalias', to='realkey')`: Alias `myalias` to `realkey` so `d['myalias']` behaves exactly like `d['realkey']` for both reads and writes. * `from_` is the first keyword argument, but typically it can be omitted and still reads fine. See below examples for this usage. See below for details on how an alias affects other dict operations.* `alias('myalias', to=('realkey', 'otherrealkey'))`: Alias `myalias` to both `realkey` and `otherrealkey`. As you might expect, this only works well for writes, as there is never any guarantee that all targets of the alias will contain the same value.* `unalias('myalias')`: Removes the `myalias` alias; any subsequent reads/writes to `myalias` will behave as normal for a regular `dict`.* `'myalias' in d` (aka `__contains__`): Returns True when given an alias, so if `myalias` is an alias to some other key, dictionary membership tests will behave as if `myalias` is set.* `del d['myalias']` (aka `__delitem__`): This effectively becomes `del d['realkey']` -- to remove the alias itself, use `unalias()`.* `del d['realkey']`: Deletes the real key/value pair (i.e. it calls `dict.__del__`) but doesn't touch any aliases pointing to `realkey`. * As a result, "dangling" aliases pointing to nonexistent keys will raise `KeyError` on access, but will continue working if the target key is repopulated later.

Caveats:

* Because of the single-key/multi-key duality, `AliasDict` is incapable of honoring non-string-type keys when aliasing (it must test `isinstance(key, basestring)` to tell strings apart from non-string iterables). * `AliasDict` instances may still *use* non-string keys, of course -- it just can't use them as alias targets.